Enhancing the Information Availability of Indonesia's Tourism Destinations Through A Travel App

Despite of Indonesia has many packages on offer to tourists, including cultural, culinary and natural attractions, UNWTO’s (2018) research revealed that Indonesia is in the 9th position in terms of the number of international tourist arrivals compared to other Asia countries in 2017. Hence, the main objective of this project is to respond the lack of information availability of Indonesia’s tourism destinations worldwide (Cholik, 2017; Petriana, 2017; Wijaya, 2017) by proposing a travel app called Extra. The utilization of an ICT tool has been preferred as it proved to be effective to support the dissemination of tourism products, services, and information (Buhalis & Law, 2008; Hyde, 2008, Caraivan, 2017). In particular, Extra aims to give tourists a local experience while visiting Indonesia, as well as to boost more exposure of Indonesia’s tourism destinations in the global market by providing tourism information, products and services derived from trusted locals.   Through using a mixed method research design, feedback from tourism stakeholders, tourists and the online questionnaire’s respondents are collected and analyzed. Main findings that were emerged from this study suggested desired features of potential users to use Extra, which are local recommendations of local tours and activities, online/offline route planning, self-designed itinerary, and ratings/reviews from other travelers. From the tourism service providers’ perspectives, Extra will be advantageous if it can provide more approachable contact to their customers, accommodate the lack of skill, time or resource to update tourism information or social media regularly, and encourage more efficient business operation by providing a single platform to manage all of tourism products and services. Due to the short nature of this study, limitations on the amount of research conducted have constrained the ability to examine certain subjects, such as the type of preferred communication channel to enable effective and more amicable interaction between tourist and tourism service providers, as well as the significance of a customer service feature in a travel app to encourage a better traveling experience. Following the data collection and analysis, a business case projection was created to propose the development and commercialization of Extra. It includes the recommendation of the business model design, market and product validation evaluation, as well as resource requirements of Extra development project.  Reflecting on the research findings and business case recommendations, taking into an acknowledgement of the necessary future research that will be discussed, the initiation step of developing Extra will be started by seeking potential project partners such as Ministry of Tourism and angel investors, as well as consulting with legal advisor to process the necessary business permits to commence a travel app business in Indonesia. Later on, in a case of successful implementation of Extra, the lean startup methodology (Ries, 2011) will be applied consistently to allow continued adjustments in order to improve the app’s service. This includes conducting further research on aspects that need further validation.  Without the implementation of Extra, it is difficult to identify the actual value propositions that are needed by both tourists and tourism stakeholders to make them use Extra or purchase it. Therefore, future research is required after the implementation of Extra in order to identify to what extent the app’s values could entice its users to pay more for the service, and what features will be likely to be altered to improve Extra’s perceived values to its users.